You can see that the wreckage on the workbench was a drone: torn off ‘arms’ of black 3D printer plastic, a broken propeller. The last flight of the Basta was nevertheless a resounding success – literally. There’s a video of it. You see it rise from a field, a black cone that bends and shoots away. Then the camera looks through the eyes of the drone itself. The prey comes into view: a white quadcopter, swaying in the distance, which quickly comes close until it fills the frame and the video goes black.
Disable a drone with a drone – Delft Dynamics, a spin-off of TU Delft, pioneered this more than ten years ago. Their DroneCatcher casts a net above another drone and takes it to a safe place. Military applications were little anticipated at the time; the idea was that you can use it to secure an airport or festival site, or prisons where criminals used drones to deliver packages over the wall.
The DroneCatcher, of which an automated version is now on the drawing board, was never built in series and it is a good one compared to the Basta, which flew for the first time this year. That’s one interceptor that autonomously maneuvers towards its target and destroys it with a hard collision – and therefore also itself. Spectacular, but the Basta is also still in the development phase. “And the trick will be to keep the unit price below ten thousand euros,” says Delft Dynamics director Arnout de Jong.
Since Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, European countries have been massively strengthening their drone capacity. Defensive against infiltrations in the airspace, offensive for a future conflict. In the Netherlands, Delft Dynamics is one of dozens of companies that benefit from new domestic and international capital for the development of software, components or complete drone and counterdrone systems.
But the bottom line is: “Most Western drone systems are too expensive and irrelevant for the kind of war Russia is waging,” wrote The Economist last month. Furthermore, developments there are moving so fast that the drone industry cannot keep up with innovation in Ukraine [kan] keep up”, quoted It Financial Daily a project leader at Tulip Tech, a Dutch manufacturer of battery packs for drones.
That is why the European model of financing, developing, producing, purchasing and stockpiling – which is expensive, slow and cumbersome – must be “completely overhauled”, said Uwe Horstmann, CEO of the German start-up Stark, which builds attack drones. in October against the Financial Times.
Hackathon on the theme of space, defense and drones at the former military air base Valkenburg near Katwijk.
Photo Dieuwertje Bravenboer
Tenders
Theo de Vries echoes him: “Military applications have given the Dutch drone sector an enormous boost and made it mature, but long delays by Defense are disastrous for the speed of innovation.”
De Vries is director of Unmanned Valley (UMV)a cluster of drone-related companies and training courses that moved into the abandoned hangars of the former Valkenburg naval air base near Katwijk from 2019 onwards. UMV is also the largest Dutch test field for drones. The old Dakota plane that is the backdrop for the musical at every performance with rotating propellers Soldier of Orange rolls in, they mockingly call it “our largest drone”.
“It shouldn’t just be a defense party here,” says De Vries. “And development also works in the other direction: military technology leads to civilian applications. Once that war is over, I even expect a tsunami of innovations from which we will learn a lot.”
Although ‘Ukraine’ now somewhat obscures the view, the drone has been advancing in the civilian domain for years. This also means that the demand for pilots and technicians is increasing so much that De Vries foresees shortages. It is very important to get young people – “the console generation”, he calls them – interested now with ‘hackathons’, self-build workshops and drone competitions in it indoor race course. This Saturday is there such a day again in the former naval air base.
Goose nests
On Wednesday, the rescue brigades of Katwijk and Noordwijk signed an agreement with Unmanned Valley to learn to work with drones. Thirty lifeguards are receiving training as drone pilots to locate drowning people more quickly and to monitor the beach. The municipality of Rotterdam previously received help when importing drones as a time- and labor-saving alternative to surveying, bridge inspection and counting goose nests.
In September, a trial started with drones from an ANWB service that transport blood and medicine between hospitals in Zwolle and Meppel via its own air corridor. This is already standard practice in sparsely populated areas in Africa and America. And in Dublin you can even have meals delivered by drone. Since this year, drones have also been seen washing windows at great heights in the Netherlands.
Drones swim over fields of broccoli to assess harvest ripeness with AI eyes. They monitor high-voltage lines and offshore installations. And it is only a matter of time before swarms of ‘networked’ drones inspect an entire offshore wind farm.
Behind the horizon
To this end, they must be able to make their own decisions outside the sight of a pilot on the ground, behind the horizon and without radio communications, if only to avoid colliding with each other. To experiment with such autonomous technology – for military and civilian purposes – there will be a permanent testing area above the North Sea between Katwijk and Rotterdam. From 2026, the so-called BVLOS flights (from beyond visible line of sight) start from Unmanned Valley.
Legally (and practically) manned and unmanned flying in the same piece of airspace is not yet possible. Even for ‘normal’ drone flights, the government works in a slow manner, says Roel van der Wal, who founded the Drone Flight Academy (DFA) after a career in the police. That school, also in Valkenburg, offers the entire range of coursesby drone pilot basic light to a certificate for flights with the highest risk.
“There is too little sense of urgency,” says Van der Wal. “I have customers who have been using one for a year and a half permit for the use of specific drones. Or take the drone box [waaruit een drone zelfstandig kan opstijgen en landen om bij te laden]. Air traffic control wants one there observer stands next to. It reminds me of the early days of the automobile in England, when a man had to walk in front of the car with a red flag.”
Hobbyists
Regulation and enforcement show gaps. Take the area around Schiphol, where there is a no-fly zone for drones, but where hundreds of violations are detected every year. In the Valkenburg command center they become visible with a few mouse clicks, in real time and that took place in the past. This mainly concerns “reckless and ignorant hobbyists”. But with a ‘staged’ toy drone at a prohibited height of three hundred meters, there must be intent.
In principle, each drone is recognizable by a unique radio code. “A basic ingredient for enforcement,” says the UMV director. “But no one is looking forward to that job.” The fines such as those imposed on 29 drone pilots during the NATO summit in June are the exception rather than the rule.
And what if it concerns truly malicious people, such as those who appear to have been behind recent incidents around airports in Denmark and military training areas in Belgium? For counter droneoperations, there is no legislation yet and the flight ban around Schiphol also applies to potential anti-drones such as the DroneCatcher or the Basta.
At Unmanned Valley they still speak of “growing pains”. This also includes recent bankruptcies and “start-ups that had to go back to the garage,” says De Vries. Start-up companies are usually run by technicians. “They remain dependent on one customer and do not yet know how to go from building prototypes to making sales. We help with that.”
Intelic, an AI drone software builder in Amsterdamalso started small and had a growth spurt thanks to ‘Ukraine’. 45 people work there, next year there should be 150, says founder Maurits Korthals Altes. “For research & development you can easily get financing, but it is a perverse incentive to continue doing R&D instead of scaling up.”
According to him, a change in mentality is still needed, including in the government. Minister Brekelmans (Defense, VVD) promised last year to be a “reliable partner” for the sector, including through long-term financing. Korthals Altes is in favor of partnerships, but long-term financing “stifles competition” and leads to “slowness,” he says. “By the time we finally finish something in the Netherlands, something better and cheaper has already been developed abroad. While we keep on poldering and pumping money into things that don’t yield anything.”
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